Get Involved

Volunteer your time to help students

Two programs of the Santa Barbara County Education Office’s Center for Community Education provide volunteer recruitment and coordination services for schools, teachers, and youth-serving organizations, and facilitate successful volunteer matches in North and in South Santa Barbara County. Please consider volunteering your time, on a short- or long-term basis. Lists of needed services to homeless and foster care students, and/or to any student can be found by clicking the button below.

Donate supplies to help students in school

Students in transition often lack basic supplies needed for school. Your donations can truly make a difference for students’ ability to successfully access and achieve in their education. We accept donations at either our Santa Maria office or in Santa Barbara. Or call any of our staff to make other arrangements.

The following school supplies are those our students need most:

1. Flash drives for students to store and transport work completed on public or school computers (preferably with a keychain or neck strap)
2. Backpacks—Junior high and high school students need black backpacks, preferably Jansport, as they last longest. For elementary school students, a wider variety of backpacks is welcome.
3. Basic school supplies, including:

Pencil pouches or holders

Graph paper

Pens

Pencils

Highlighters

Erasers

Colored pencils

Notebooks or loose college ruled paper

Dividers

Binders

4. Small bottles of anti-bacterial hand sanitizer
5. Books for all age groups (many students have no books at all for leisure reading)
6. Bus passes (to use public transportation to get to school)

Supplies that don’t at first seem directly related to school, are in fact crucial to ensuring that a student comes to school every day, ready to learn:

Donate money

Monetary contributions are always appreciated. Such funds can enable Transitional Youth Services to serve more students than our primary funding allows, and/or serve existing students more comprehensively. Donations of funds are typically used to purchase backpacks (always a high need item), distribute more school supplies, and to add more tutoring hours to our tutoring program, serving more students. Donors are welcome to designate specific uses to which they prefer their contribution applied.